Blessed by a Broken Heart - Courting Marry

Anton Grigorievich Rubinstein once suggested that “Ode to Joy” should be interpreted as “Ode to Joy”, because Schiller supposedly had to replace the word “Freiheit” with “Joy” (Freude) so that the poem was censored. This hypothesis is interesting, but erroneous. In Schiller’s ode, we are talking about joy, the “daughter of Elysium”, which applies to all worlds and all creations, so a hypothetical reverse replacement of “joy” with “freedom” is completely impossible. "Ode to Joy" expressed the spirit of the Enlightenment, for which an optimistic worldview was one of the main spiritual constants. In the years that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was composed, the ideals of the Enlightenment were either scolded, skeptically denied, or simply forgotten as something old-fashioned. But Beethoven himself remained faithful to these ideals.And in the finale of his last symphony, he tried to paint a picture of the utopian unity of mankind - free and enlightened.